


Here For You

by pastelaliens



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Extended Scene, Light Angst, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 19:30:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pastelaliens/pseuds/pastelaliens
Summary: It takes only a moment of captivity for Lio to forget the color of the sky on a clear day, the feeling of grass soft underfoot, the gentle touch of wind as it lifts his hair from his neck.We Burnish are free.His own words are a ghost back to haunt him.In his last moments, Lio thinks of Galo.





	Here For You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marowe/gifts).

It takes only a moment of captivity for Lio to forget the color of the sky on a clear day, the feeling of grass soft underfoot, the gentle touch of wind as it lifts his hair from his neck.

_We Burnish are free._ His own words are a ghost back to haunt him. 

He is reduced to this one thing: helplessness. His arms and legs are lashed to the core ripped from the heart of Lio de Galon— but it’s his own chest that feels empty, torn open and hollowed out by clawed hands. He’s been made useless and powerless in a matter of seconds by Kray Foresight, whose evilness runs deeper than even Lio, in all his endless hatred of him, could have imagined. 

To think that he’s been one of them all this time. But no, not one of them, not a member of this family which has suffered so much for so long. What has Kray Foresight ever suffered in all his life of moral bankruptcy? He may have the same powers— but he shares none of the same experiences. He is not Burnish. 

The _real_ Burnish, his people, his family, are all around him. They _scream_ and his voice joins theirs as the abomination of a ship leeches his life from him— but he doesn’t scream for himself. He does for _them_: the ones he couldn’t protect, the ones he couldn’t save. All of their hopes, all of their dreams of a life free from hatred, slowly turn to ash just out of reach. Lio’s throat, raw and ravaged, doesn’t know anything but this agony; he wants so badly to speak to them, to say, _I’m sorry, I’ve failed you, I’m sorry,_ but he can’t remember how. They wouldn’t be able to hear him over their own cries, anyway.

And Galo—

Something in his chest tightens. How can his heart ache when it was already stolen from the vault of his ribs?

—Galo must have been the first to die. Lio hadn’t been able to protect him, either. The way Kray had thrown him from such a height without so much as blinking— if he hadn’t already been considered a monster before, certainly that act cemented the fact of it. 

Lio begs for mercy not for himself but for Galo, who he hopes died quickly, dashed onto the rubble so far below. His scream catches in his throat when he thinks of what Galo must look like, betrayed and broken to pieces. He was the best of them. He wanted so badly to understand and to help and he gave all of himself over to Lio without question, with the utmost trust, with a smile on that face so honest and open, so bright and beautiful in all its goodness. 

In his moment of greatest pain, the Promare come to him and whisper into his ear. Within, something misplaced is righted again— _but you came too late,_ he wants to tell them. The life is leaving him; the flames are taking him, finally, as he’d always known they would. As his fingers turn to ash, he laments all the things he never felt beneath them, and in his last moment of consciousness, he thinks he might have liked to hold Galo’s face in his palms and feel the way that mouth stretched into a grin under his fingertips.

_Lio!_

So many times he imagined death; it was never so sweet as hearing the sound of his name from a familiar voice. 

_Lio’s fire protected m—_

A chill overtakes him. It feels foreign in his body, unwelcome. 

_I’ll save him—_

He’d wanted to be a furious blaze, an inferno to swallow whole all those who would take away the Burnish’s deserved freedom— but now he’s a barely flickering flame. He’s sorry. He’s sorry. His regrets will follow him when he returns to the earth. 

_Don’t die, Lio. Don’t disappear._

The press of fingers underneath his chin, tilting his head back, is the first thing he feels that isn’t the cold, unforgiving rubble beneath him. There’s a gentle hand at the top of his head; _Warm_, he wants to say, but the words won’t come. Let him die like this, then, beneath so sweet a touch. 

Sweeter, still, are the lips that press to his own. _Fire_, suddenly. It crawls down his throat and in its wake all of his broken flesh inside and out is renewed. _Breath_— he fills his lungs from that very mouth, takes all it offers him. When he opens his eyes, when they meet Galo’s gaze blue as the sky on a clear day, his heart returns to him.

“Galo..?”

In this new, second life, Galo’s name is the first word Lio speaks. 

“You made it, Lio.” Is that relief? Is it anything compared to the relief that sweeps through Lio when the realization settles in that Galo is alive and well, whole and _here_? He’d never been the first to die; he’d _lived_, and he’d come when Lio needed him most. 

Lio wants to laugh, full and warm and bright as a flame, but he swallows it. Instead, he says in a whisper, “Did you save me?” He knows, he knows. It couldn’t have been anyone else. All around him is quiet; the screams of the Burnish have stopped. Galo had, in his own loud and clumsy and wonderful way, done everything Lio couldn’t. He feels no resentment at this fact— only gratitude. 

But there’s more work to be done. The Promare have given him the solution. The world must be destroyed to be saved. He pulls himself from the wreckage, warm with life again, and everywhere Galo's hands had landed are the parts of him that feel ablaze. _Let’s just burn the earth to the ground._

And after— after, he’ll find his courage and take from this life what he hadn’t been able from his first. He’ll feel Galo warm and alive beneath his fingertips, trace the curve of his smile, give freely the kiss that will save him again, and again, and again.

**Author's Note:**

> come talk promare with me @paybackisawitch on twit xo


End file.
